Canon Color ImageClass MF810Cdn Review and Ratings

Editors’ Rating:

Our Verdict:
The MF810Cdn prints excellent documents, graphics, and photos, and offers huge paper-handling options. But it’s a good value only for those who will emphasize mono output on it—and stretch the limits of its 60,000-plus-page duty cycle. Read More…

What We Liked…

Very good print, scan, and copy quality

Hardy construction

650-sheet default input capacity, with significant expansion options

What We Didn’t…

A bit costly, with print speeds comparatively sluggish for the price

Color cost per page is not competitive

No Wi-Fi connectivity, nor an option for it

Small output tray relative to input

Huge and heavy

Canon Color ImageClass MF810Cdn Review

Table of Contents

Introduction & Design

It’s not every day that a printer comes to our labs on the back of an 18-wheeler, strapped to a pallet and requiring at least two people to lift the machine out of the box. Typically, packages are shipped in this manner, via "freight," to make them easier to move around—say, from plane to truck, or from one truck to another. Today’s review unit was hard enough to move from door to den—never mind across the country

The Canon ImageClass MF810Cdn is the less-expensive sibling of another high-volume laser, Canon’s $1,299-MSRP ImageClass MF820Cdn Color Laser Printer, a formidable multifunction color laser we reviewed (and dragged to and fro) back in April 2015. The MFC820Cdn weighed in at just over 99 pounds. The MFC810Cdn isn’t exactly the slim twin; this $999-MSRP beast weighs just over 95 pounds. That said, aside from noting a lower maximum Canon-rated monthly duty cycle (67,000 pages per month, versus 88,000), we didn’t find many significant differences between these two models. They’re both big and bulky, and they both print quite well.

Granted, Canon has a host of enormous ImageClass printers in its product-line past. But in addition to being reasonably fast, this one (as you’ll see in the section coming up) brings several firsts to the ImageClass series. These include large (3.5-inch) touch-enabled displays and a few new mobile-connectivity features. (These too, we’ll get to in a moment.)

The biggest bottom-line checkmark in the MF810Cdn’s Pros column, though, is that delivers a decent black-and-white cost per page (CPP), which we’ll look at in some depth in the Setup & Paper Handling section later on. We’ll also talk some there about this model’s expansion options, which include combinations of paper cassettes that can take paper capacity upward of 2,000 sheets.

Then, too, the MF810Cdn comes with a wealth of security, productivity, and convenience features that you’d expect from a $1,000 workgroup printer, among them device and document-management software, and a host of mobile connectivity options, including Canon’s Mobile Printing app—again, all of which we’ll cover over the next few pages.

Granted, the ImageClass MF810Cdn Color Laser Printer isn’t for everybody; you’d need a rather busy team or office to justify this much printer and this much horsepower. But, as mentioned, if you realize you need to start pushing this printer to its limits down the road, it can expand with you. Canon provides expansions to give your printer more—a lot more—capacity. As full-featured, color-laser MFPs go, the ImageClass MF810Cdn is a pretty good one.

Design

As we noted about the MF820Cdn, the MF810Cdn, too, is "office-sober." In other words, no matter how you look at it, this is a no-nonsense color-laser MFP, and the look isn’t going to dress up your den or bedroom. It looks like office equipment, and it’s large and in charge.

At just over 20 inches across, 22.3 inches from front to back, 2 feet high and, as mentioned, weighing a whopping 95 pounds, this is by no means a desktop printer, unless your desk is a big slab of concrete. You’ll need to factor in and find someplace sturdy to set this big beast down. Ideally, it will be something on wheels, to make it easier to move around if needed. (A couple of the expansion modules, discussed in an upcoming section, come with wheels, but as you’ll see, these add-ons are not cheap.)

Locating this printer in the right spot is a key consideration, even before you buy. Why? A lack of Wi-Fi support. That means you’ll need to connect the printer to your network via Ethernet, or you can connect it to one PC via USB. Both are wired connections, and wherever you plan to put the machine, cabling must reach. The thinking behind this model is that it’s going to reside on a busy office network, with Ethernet access panels or the like within a cable run’s reach.

Even so, the MF810Cdn, despite the curious lack of wireless-network connectivity, supports a number of mobile-device connectivity features, among them Google’s Cloud Print, Apple’s AirPrint, the MOPRIA Print Service, Canon Mobile Scanning for Business, and Canon Mobile Printing. To make use of these mobile features, the MF810Cdn must be network-connected (not direct-attached) and through that connected to the Internet; attempting to access these features over USB won’t work.

One of these mobile-access features is worth highlighting. The MOPRIA Print Service, a relatively new, emerging connection type, is a mobile-printing feature built into Android 4.4 and later. It allows you to connect to any MOPRIA-certified printer with no additional driver-hunting or setup. Nowadays, if the speed with which printers are signing up for the MOPRIA service is any indication, most consumer-grade and small-business MFPs will soon be on the list.

MOPRIA doesn’t currently work with (and thus allow for printing from) all Android apps, but it does work with some of Android’s most popular utilities, among them Chrome, Gmail, Photo, and Drive, as well as many popular third-party Android apps available at Google Play.

What we found particularly helpful was this printer’s big and easy-to-read control panel, which is anchored by a 3.5-inch touch screen. From here, not only can you configure the printer, but you can also configure and perform most walk-up, or PC-free tasks, such as printing from or scanning to USB thumb drives, or scanning to network drives. The dedicated USB port for attaching thumb drives is to the right of the panel.

In addition, this MFP’s versatility is increased further with Canon’s inclusion of a few different page-description languages, or PDLs: Microsoft’s XPS Document Writer, PCL5c, PCL6, and PostScript 3. In addition to allowing you to print excellent-quality documents directly from your in-house laser printer, these PDLs let you use it as a composite, or proofing, machine when producing documents designed for high-end printing presses and typesetters. Like we always say about printers that ship with these somewhat specialized page-description languages, if you need them, most likely you’ll know why.

Table of Contents

Canon Color ImageClass MF810Cdn

Our Verdict:
The MF810Cdn prints excellent documents, graphics, and photos, and offers huge paper-handling options. But it’s a good value only for those who will emphasize mono output on it—and stretch the limits of its 60,000-plus-page duty cycle.

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